von_geisterhand

About 6.5 years after really liking it. Now, 4 seasons of "Sherlock" and a few episodes of "Doctor Who" later, I'm not quite as taken with it anymore.
James Nesbitt is great, Gina Bellman is gorgeous and at least the first two episodes show a lot of promise. Oh, and some of the dialogue is really funny/witty, just as some of the twists are quite inventive.

But
More than ever I am starting to doubt that Gina Bellman is much of an actress. I have this theory (mainly on the basis of "Coupling") that there is a certain type of woman that pops up in Moffat series that is mainly there to look gorgeous but little else. Gina Bellman is certainly the most capable actress on that spectrum, but it pains me to actually look at her in those terms. Having said that and knowing that she has apparently done good things on "Doctor Who", I always suspected that Michelle Ryan was pretty much a Moffat Woman in this series.*

In the same vein some of the dialogue is clearly funny but delivered terribly which makes me wonder how the director could let it be fucked up so badly. :-/
The Scary Opera Vocal is also starting to become annoying and quite frankly who ever thought that the comedy monster teeth were a good idea particularly as Hyde never really uses them?

Two more episodes to go and I know this is the part where it's getting silly.

* In case you're interested: To me the worst of the bunch is the "Woman with the Legs" in Coupling 2.1. Yes, she is pretty but she cannot deliver an honest line to save her lip gloss.

Having now seen the trailer for the "Ghost in the Shell"-remake on the big screen three times I was reminded of just how breathtaking the film will probably look in that format. Watching trailer (and films!) on a small laptop just isn't the right way to experience them.
At the same time I also suddenly wondered why a "live action" remake of an anime was even considered necessary, except for purely monetary reasons. Particularly, as the "reality" the film presents is a very stylized one heavily influenced by.... anime and computer games. It's ouroboros of modern culture.
The same goes for "Beauty and the Beast". Just.... why..... why.... why?
Fuck this fake nostalgia!

Gab es wohl je eine Zeit, zu der das Sprichwort "Wo man singt, da lass Dich nieder. Böse Menschen kennen keine Lieder." wirklich stimmte?
Weil, wenn man sagen wir mal, die Nazis als "Böse Menschen" klassifiziert, dann stimmt das Sprichwort schon nicht mehr, weil die Nazis ja mal ein ganz beachtliches Repertoire an Liedern hatten. Und auch noch in den 1990ern könnte man sicherlich behaupten, daß sowas wie der "Drina-Marsch" als Musik von bösen Leuten zu bezeichnen ist, zumindest aus der Perspektive der Frauen, die zu diesem Lied regelmäßig vergewaltigt wurden.
Es würde mich wundern, wenn es nicht schon im Mittelalter und davor Lieder gab, die Raubritter vor, nach oder während ihrer bösen Taten sangen.

I've been watching the Ellen-Page-speech about five times today and each time her coming out passes, I feel myself welling up a bit more. And I hate myself for it. I hate the fact that it is still a big thing in this world to make an admission like that, that it still has to be considered a brave act to essentially say "I might want to kiss somebody who I will never be inseminated by". By an actress in Hollywood, people. I know actors and I have ideas about Hollywood and I am certain that there are shitloads of gay actors and actresses out and about working all over Hollywood. Surely this cannot be an issue there anymore.
Ellen Page, star of "Juno" and "Hard Candy", also hardly is the poster girl for traditional family values but I understand that a young and attractive woman is bound to be a better headline grabber than an aged man like Joel Schumacher (Yes, he is gay. Haven't you seen his Batman films?), even if it does make me grumble on some level.

But each time I watch the clip, I see a bit more of her nervousness and her vulnerability and each time it does touch me and make me glad that here is somebody who might now be well on her way to a happiness and level of comfort that is currently eluding me, if she hasn't found it already.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I recently watched a programme on some (white, well off, american) children between 8 and 17 whose inner gender does not match their bio-gender. Some of them had already begun taking hormones and were now thinking about surgery and some of them were still uncertain about whether they ever wanted to take that step.
What made me think, though, besides questions about performing surgery on pre-puberty bodies, was something one of the little boys said: When asked why he felt that he was a boy despite the fact he had been born as a female, he answered that he had always liked to play with boys' toys like remote-controlled cars and enjoyed sports like Karate, far more than taking part in typical girls' activities. Fair enough, you'd say, and not something one has not heard before.
On the other hand, this also accepts and reinforces the traditional ideas of what it is like to be a boy/girl and what is and is not proper for either gender. This always saddens me a little bit.
I mean, fair enough, you can't ask too much from a child around 10 (sorry, can't remember how old exactly) but I had hoped that we as a society had now reached a level of intelligence where (for example) a bio-girl happily living as and being seen as a "girl" can play with a remote-controlled car and excel at Karate without this in any way meaning.... well, anything more. They don't, or should not, take away your "girl-license" just because you don't conform to a standard that was set more than 50 years ago. "Girl/Boy/Man/Woman" are concepts of consensual definition and therefore more than fluid.

Be what you want to be and be it any way you decide.